I believe Paul invented Christianity, not Jesus. There are only a couple of last minute, thrown-in scriptures that Christians use to claim Jesus intended to start a new church, but the overwhelming evidence points to Jesus merely trying to reform Judaism.

He went on to say,

Paul is definitely the one that changed Christianity into what it is even today. It was Paul that actually brought the Gentiles into the fold without the need for circumcision. It was Paul that stated Jesus fulfilled Mosaic Law including the law of tithing, on and on. The movement that Paul inherited was not a unique religion but was a Jewish sect. Paul made it a unique religion. In fact, if there actually was a falling away, Paul is the one that initiated it.

In a previous post on the Apostle Paul’s Remains, Bishop Rick said,

There are many who believe that without Paul, there would be no Christian faith…that it is him that kept it from going the way of all the cults of the time. It was Paul that took Christianity beyond Judaism. Until then, it was really just another Jewish sect.

As I mentioned there, and I will mention again, I disagree with Bishop Rick.  Here in America, we tend to think the Catholic Church claims to be founded from Peter, and then Martin Luther started the Reformation.  Mormons believe Joseph Smith started the restoration.  However, such a  picture is highly simplistic, and not entirely accurate.

At the death of Christ, there was a large movement known as Gnosticism.  This dates right to the time of Christ.  Christian gnostics believed that Christ was not actually human, that he was not born, and that he came supernaturally to the earth.  They don’t believe in Mary, Joseph, the star, and all that is associated in the Biblical story.  The Gospel of Thomas is a gnostic gospel.  It is not a narrative, like the 4 gospels are, but rather just a group of sayings of Jesus.  Gnostics valued intellectual/spiritual knowledge above all.  One could say they were the first group to espouse “intellectualism.”  Gnosticism is kind of an umbrella term, like Protestantism.  Just as not all Protestants believe exactly the same things, there are different flavors of Gnosticism.  Gnostic groups rivaled Orthodox Christianity in size until about the 7th or 8th centuries.  Constantine persecuted the Gnostics in favor of Orthodox Christianity.  I did another post discussing the varying beliefs of Gnostics.

About 2 years ago, I did a post on Montanism which dates to about 170 AD.  Briefly Montanus was a Christian prophet from Turkey, and I discussed interesting similarites between him and Joseph Smith.  I also did a post on Marcionism.   Marcion lived 110 – 160 AD in Sinope, Turkey.  He is probably the first person who tried to establish a Christian canon.  His New Testament was much smaller than ours today.  It included an edited version of the Gospel of Luke, and 10 of Paul’s letters.  He was the son of a bishop, and originally embraced by the orthdox church, but due to his embracing of Gnostic doctrines, he was excommunicated.  However, his movement became so large that it rivaled the orthodox church in size for about a century.

I also know about Ariunism, but have yet to post on the topic.  Arius was an early Christian leader that rejected the doctrine of the Trinity.  Now his idea of God isn’t the same as the Mormon conceptualization either, but he does show some diversity of thought as well.

The Catholic church wasn’t really distinct from the Orthodox Church officially until about 1000 AD.  A case can be made that there was some schismatic activity as early as about 700 AD, but prior to 1000, there really was no Catholic church–it was known as the Orthodox Church.  I previously discussed the idea of theosis in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and its similarities to Mormon Exaltation.

So, suffice it to say, I think there is a lot more diversity of Christianity than simply Paul.  Certainly Paul was a great missionary, and affected Western Christianity significantly.  However, Gnosticism was well established at the time of Paul, and certainly other movements like Marcionism, Ariunism, and Montanism (to name a few) spread Christianity as well.  I think it is a stretch to call Paul the author of Christianity.

I probably should give a review of these 3 sources.  Of the 3, I liked The Jesus Tomb best.  Jacobovici does DNA tests on the bones, chemical tests on the ossuaries, and uses statisticians to try to locate the probability of find a tomb with Jesus, two Mary’s (mother and wife), a brother James, and son of Joseph.  You may disagree with his results, but he did make a valiant effort to be scientific about it.  (A note about an ossuary.  Apparently at the time of Christ, people were often buried in a tomb.  After about a year, the body would decompose, leaving only the bones.  To save space, it was a custom to take the bones and “re-bury” them in a much smaller limestone box.  The largest bone in the body is the upper leg, so the box would only need to be about 2 feet long, and the bones would be placed there to save considerable space.  Often names were etched into these limestone boxes to identify the bones.)

Bloodline was dreadful.  Honestly, it was so hokey, I actually couldn’t pay attention to the whole thing.  It was supposedly a real life cloak and daggar documentary.  The producers would set up interviews with experts of Jesus’ bones in France, and they would either end up dead prior to the interview, or would just refuse.  Of the experts they managed to actually interview, most seemed like whack-jobs to me.  I give it no credibility.

I have just briefly skimmed the India site–I came upon it a few weeks ago.  I don’t quite know what to make of it yet.  I have heard people compare Christ to Buddha, and some claim they might have been the same person.  I do know of an ancient tradition that the Apostle Thomas (yes, Doubting Thomas) served a mission to India.  (Apparently, these claims about Thomas seem pretty credible.)  I also know that India has an ancient Christian history.  Really, I need to learn more, but it is interesting to me.

So, with Christ being resurrected, Christians would obviously find these 3 sources as problematic.  If Christ was really resurrected, there should be no bones, right?  I must say I was really intrigued by Simcha Jacobovici’s position.  Simcha is a Jew, and said that if the bones were really discovered, then it would actually give credibility to Christianity, because it would in fact give proof that Jesus was an actual person.  (Of course, there are many who claim Jesus never existed, citing lack of evidence.)

So, it got me thinking.  Obviously, all 3 can’t be right.  But what if one of them is right?  Critics of Christianity would loudly trumpet the fact that the resurrection couldn’t have happened if the bones were found.  They already make claims that say this discovery “would shake the foundations of Christianity”, seeming to imply that Christianity would somehow disappear.  But would it really disappear?

I don’t think so.  Let’s assume for sake of argument that one of these positions was scientifically proved correct–Jesus bones have been positively found.  Now, while I am sure it would cause much re-evaluation among Christians, I do not believe Christianity would vanish.  I suspect that many Christians would have to re-evaluate the resurrection.  Here’s some possible scenarios that I see happening.

(1)  The resurrection is actually not a physical resurrection.  I believe many people already believe this.  When we look at it, it’s a little tough to reconcile with the scriptures, because Jesus ate fish and honey after his resurrection.  “Touch me” was his reply–so it does seem to be a fact that he was physically resurrected.  But perhaps this physical resurrection would only apply to him, and not us?

(2)  Perhaps there was some sort of stem-cell/cloning technique for the resurrection.  Perhaps Jesus “corruptible” body is on the earth, but his new “celestial” body looks/feels the same, but is basically a perfected clone of his human body.

(3)  Perhaps the resurrection is not important at all.  Perhaps the Gnostics had it right, and the body is not needed in heaven.  Perhaps, Jesus true purpose is not the resurrection, but rather his purpose was to teach spiritual truths.  In this scenario, the resurrection is meaningless, and Christ’s atonement and teachings are what really matters.

I’m sure there are other options.  Can you think of some?  If Christ’s bones were truly found, would it really spell the end of Christianity, as skeptics claim?

For those who don’t know the origins of the Book of Abraham, Joseph claims to have translated the Book of Abraham from some Egyptian papyrus that he purchased from a person exhibiting Egyptian artifacts.  The papyrus were originally believed to have perished in a fire, though some of these scrolls were actually discovered in 1967, and translated by Egyptologists.  The translation has no resemblance to the Book of Abraham, and seems to be a sort of funeral scroll.  Therefore, some people charge that the Book of Abraham is really a fraud.  Even if this is a fraud, how does this explain the similarities to the Jewish Midrash, and the Koran?

To counter these claims,  Hugh Nibley notes that not all of the papyrus was found.  Perhaps there were some funeral scrolls mixed in with the Book of Abraham, and perhaps the real Book of Abraham that Joseph translated was not found.  Many critics scoff at this claim.

However, I have also been learning about the Gospel of Judas.  Scholars have known for centuries that a gospel attributed to Judas existed, because of a reference by an ancient Christian priest named Saint Ireneaus in 180.  The Christian canon did not exist in the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries, and St Ireneaus was of the first Christian leaders to try to create a canon of Christian writings.  He was one of the first to make the claim that there should be four gospels, and that many of the other gospels (at least 50 at the time) that were in existence at the time were false.  He specifically mentioned the Gospel of Judas as an especially dubious heresy.

Until recently nobody knew the Gospel of Judas existed.  Some Egyptian papyrus was discovered in 1978, and shopped on the black market for many years.  (It was actually advertised in the classified ads in the New York Times, and sold or stolen several times on the black market.)  There was even a National Geographic special announcing the discovery of the Gospel of Judas in 2006.

The discovery is very interesting, and the ancient document was written in an ancient form of Egyptian, called Coptic.  (Is this “reformed Egyptian”?)  The Coptic Christian Church still exists today, and dates from this early time period.  The copy discovered isn’t quite as old at Ireneaus, but dates to about the 1600 years ago.  It’s not quite as old as Ireneaus, but it certainly is ancient, and might be the same gospel he was referring to.  Ireneaus was talking about a Greek text, but he Gospel of Judas is probably a Coptic translation of the original Greek text.  (You may want to learn more about Gnosticism, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Nag Hammadi Library from my previous post on this.)

Prior to the National Geographic special, rumors that the Gospel of Judas had been found were rampant among the academic community.  The book was mixed up with several other books (apparently these ancient Egyptians were trying to conserve papyrus), many of which had nothing to do with spiritual subjects.  Someone apparently leaked a photograph of some of these papyri on the internet, and most scholars were of the opinion that the Gospel of Judas did not really exist.  The internet photograph claimed that the writings were the Gospel of Judas, but the translation was obviously of another book.  So, the Gospel of Judas find was deemed a hoax.

However, National Geographic obtained the papyrus, and had some modern scholars translate it.  Sure enough, the internet photographs were genuine, but only contained a portion of the entire papyrus.  The Gospel of Judas, was mixed in with some other writings, and it is an extremely important and interesting find in ancient Christian writings, because it shows a much greater diversity of Christian thought.  The Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic text, which was a competing form of Christianity, and was just as big or bigger in some parts of the Roman Empire.  When Constantine converted to Christianity, he converted to Orthodox Christianity, and then set about persecuting the Gnostics.  Eventually the persecution forced them out of existence.

So, I want to quote from Bart Ehrmann’s book called The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot.  Bart is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and participated in the translation of this lost gospel.  I just found some of the experiences with the Gospel of Judas as strikingly similar to Nibley’s theory about the Book of Abraham.  From page 67,

In chapter 1, I described my trip to Geneva in December 2004.  There I laid eyes on the Gospel of Judas for the first time.  I was obviously elated by the possibilities.  But as I returned from my trip I had more questions than answers.  I had looked over some pages of the Coptic text but had no opportunity to study and translate them.  What could be found on the pages I had seen?

…page 68

While still thrilled by the prospects, I found a discussion on the Internet that made my heart sink.

There is a Dutch blogger name Michel van Rijn who runs a very peculiar web site that specializes in debunking claims about modern art and ancient artifacts.  Van Rijn had gotten wind of the Gospel of Judas story, tracked down some leads, and learned that National Geographic was planning to spend considerable time and effort promoting the release of the document and its translation-and presumably would make a lot of money off it.  Van Rijn decided to explode the entire operation by publishing all the surviving materials before National Geographic itself had a chance to do so.

Van Rijn found an American scholar, Charlie Hedrick-a New Testament scholar I have known and liked for years-who claimed to have photographs of the Gospel of Judas and to have already made preliminary translations of them.  In order to squash any speculation about the Gospel, and to beat National Geographic to the punch, van Rijn published the photographs and the translations.  When I read them, I was massively disappointed.

The first text appeared to have nothing to do with Judas and Jesus.  It was a Gnostic document whose main figure was someone called Allogenes, who prays to God and hears God’s answer.  The text had Gnostic characteristics, and it would be of some limited interest to scholars of Gnosticism.  But as far as Judas and Jesus were concerned, it was a complete bust.

It is amazing how even those of us who teach for a living fail to practice what we preach.  Every semester in my undergraduate courses at Chapel Hill I have to tell my students not to trust everything they find on the Internet, since anyone can publish anything there, and there is often no way of knowing if the source is credible or bogus.  In this particular case, not having followed my own advice, I was completely taken in.

What I didn’t know at the time, but eventually came to realize, is that Hedrick had translated the wrong text.

My first indication that something was amiss came in July 1, 2005.  I was in New York on other business and had set up a lunch date at the Harvard Club with Herb Krosney, whom I mentioned earlier as the investigative journalist who had originally tracked down the Gospel of Judas, found that it was owned now by the Maecenas Foundation in Geneva, interested National Geographic in the story, and more or less single-handedly pushed the story forward-leading eventually to my hurried trip to Geneva six months before.  Over lunch in July I expressed my real frustration that the whole story was soon to collapse on itself, that there was not in fact much of a story at all, because I had read the Hedrick translation and frankly couldn’t understand why National Geographic was still interested in pursuing the matter.

Herb knew what was actually in the text, but he was not at liberty to give me all the details.  With a twinkle in his eye, he suggested that I not believe everything I read on the Internet (the advice I give students just about every week).  But I persisted; I had seen the photographs of the Coptic pages, they looked similar in quality to the pages I had seen in Geneva, I had seen Hedrick’s transcription of the pages, and I had checked his translation.  There just wasn’t much there.  All Herb could do was throw out a tantalizing hint: maybe Hedrick was translating a different part of the book.

It was only later that I realized what had happened.  As we will see in this chapter, when scholars first gained access to this manuscript and were able to determine its contents, they believed it contained fragmentary copies of three texts. Two of which were already known from earlier archaeological discoveries: the Letter of Peter to Philip and the First Apocalypse of James, copies of which had been discovered had been discovered among the writings of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945.  The third text was the gold mine: the Gospel of Judas.  But it was not until Florence Darbre, the expert in manuscript restoration, and Rodolphe Kasser, the eminent Coptologist responsible for editing and translation the text, had worked on the manuscript for three years that they realized what no one-including van Rijn and Hedrick-had before suspected.  The final part of the manuscript contained not just one document-the Gospel of Judas-but two.  The other one was a fragmentary copy of an otherwise unknown Gnostic treatise about this figure Allogenes.  Hedrick had assumed that his photographs were from the Gospel of Judas.  They weren’t.  They were from a different text.  This changed things drastically.

…page 70

One of the strangest facts about archaeological discoveries of early Jewish and Christian manuscripts is that the most spectacular finds are almost never made by trained archaeologists.  Most of them are the result of pure serendipity.  Moreover, they are typically discovered by people who have no idea what it is they have discovered and no sense of their real worth.

…page 71 [formatting slightly changed]

The limestone box contained four different manuscripts in codex form (that is, they were books, not scrolls).  Later scholars would identify these ancient codices as follows.  None of them, except the Gospel of Judas codes, has yet been published or otherwise made public:

1.       A mathematical treatise, written in Greek

2.       A fragmentary copy of the Old Testament book of Exodus, also in Greek

3.       A fragmentary copy of some of the New Testament letters of the apostle Paul, written in Coptic

4.       The codex containing the Gospel of Judas (as I will explain later, we have the complete beginning and end of the Gospel, and much of the middle, but some portions have not been lost because of the rough handling of the manuscript after its discovery; about 10-15 percent of the text is now unrecoverable), along with three other fragmentary texts, all of them Coptic:

a.       The Letter of Peter to Philip (in a version slightly different from the one discovered at Nag Hammadi),

b.      The First Apocalypse of James (also different from the Nag Hammadi version),

c.       And the Gnostic treatise on Allogenes (which is a different work from the Nag Hammadi tractate that is entitled “Allogenes”)

The discovery of the Gospel of Judas, with the initial skepticism of its existence lends credibility to Nibley’s contention that the Book of Abraham might still be still missing, and that they were combined with other non-religious texts.  Since I have been reviewing Rough Stone Rolling again, I decided to see what Bushman had to say on the topic.  From pages 285-6,

…Michael H. Chandler, who arrived in Kirtland on July 3, 1835, with four mummies and some rolls of papyrus.  Something of an opportunist and promoter, Chandler had exhibited the artifacts in Cleveland in March and come to Kirtland, he said, because of Joseph Smiths translating powers.  Chandler’s account of the mummies is full of contradictions.  He claimed he had inherited the artifacts from his uncle, Antonio Lebolo.  Lebolo had indeed obtained Egyptian artifacts around 1820 and distributed the finds to various European museums before he died in 1830, but no mention of Chandler or mummies were made in Lebolo’s probate papers.  He had earlier arranged for a Trieste merchant to sell eleven mummies that were forwarded to New York, and probably Chandler purchased the artifacts in New York, thinking to exhibit them and then sell them.  On inspecting the papyri, Joseph announced that one rolls contained the writings of Abraham of Ur and another the writings of Joseph of Egypt.  Excited by this discovery, he encouraged some of the Kirtland Saints to purchase four mummies and the papyri for $2,400, a huge sum when money was desperately needed for other projects.

…

Joseph Smith’s Book of Abraham is best thought of as an apocryphal addition to the Genesis story of Abraham, in the same vein as the Enoch passages in the Book of Moses.  Characteristically, Joseph’s translated account did not repeat the familiar biblical stories, instead expanding on a few verses about Abraham’s origins in Ur of the Chaldees, adding material not mentioned in the Bible.  The published version contained two chapters giving an account of Abraham’s ordeal in Ur and his departure for Canaan and Egypt.

… page 290

The Abraham texts gave Joseph another chance to let his followers try translating.  While working on the Book of Mormon in 1829, Joseph invited Oliver Cowdery to translate: he tried and failed.  Now with the Egyptian papyri before them, Joseph again let the men with the greatest interest in such undertakings-Cowdery, William W. Phelps, Warren Parrish, and Frederick G. Williams-attempt translations.  Parrish was told he “shall see much of my ancient records, and shall know of hiden things, and shall be endowed with a knowledge of hiden languages.”

Through the fall of 1835, the little group made various attempts.  “This after noon labored on the Egyptian alphabet, in company with [brothers] O. Cowdery and W. W. Phelps,” Joseph’s journal notes.  They seem to have copied lines of Egyptian from the papyrus and worked out stories to go with the text.  Or they wrote down an Egyptian character and attempted various renditions.  Joseph apparently had translated the first two chapters of Abraham-through chapter 2, verse 18, in the current edition-and the would-be translators matched up hieroglyphs with some of his English sentences.  Their general method can be deduced from a revelation given to Oliver Cowdery after he failed to translate the gold plates:  “You must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right, I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you.”  One can imagine these men staring at the characters, jotting down ideas that occurred to them, hoping for a burning confirmation.  They tried one approach after another.  Joseph probably threw in ideas of his own.  Eventually, they pulled their work together into a collection they called “Grammar & A[l]phabet of the Egyptian Language,” written in the hands of Phelps and Parrish.

Of all the men working on the papyri, only Joseph produced a coherent text.  What was going on as he translated?  For many years, Mormon assumed that he sat down with the scrolls, looked at each Egyptian word, and by inspiration understood its meaning in English.  He must have been reading from a text, so Mormons thought, much as a conventional translator would do, except the words came by revelation rather than out of his own learning.  In 1967, that view of translation suffered a blow when eleven scraps of the Abraham papyri, long since lost and believed to have been burned, were discovered in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and given to Latter-day Saint leaders in Salt Lake City.  Color pictures were soon printed and scholars went to work.  The texts were thought to be papyri with his translation, and the same pictures appeared on the museum fragments.  Moreover, some of the characters from the Egyptian grammar appeared on the fragments.  The translation of these texts by expert Egyptologists would finally prove or disprove Joseph’s claims to miraculous translating powers.  Would any of the language correspond to  the text in his Book of Abraham?  Some Mormons were crushed when the fragments turned out to be rather conventional funerary texts placed with mummified bodies, in this case Hôr’, to assure continuing life as an immortal god.  According to Egyptologists, nothing on the fragments resembled Joseph’s account of Abraham.

Some Mormon scholars, notably Hugh Nibley, doubt that the actual texts for Abraham and Joseph have been found.  The scraps from the Metropolitan Museum do not fit the description Joseph Smith gave of long, beautiful scrolls.  At best the remnants are a small fraction of the originals, with no indication of what appears on the lost portions.  Nonetheless, the discovery prompted a reassessment of the Book of Abraham.  What was going on while Joseph “translated” the papyri and dictated text to a scribe?  Obviously, he was not interpreting the hieroglyphics like an ordinary scholar.  As Joseph saw it, he was working by inspiration-that had been clear from the beginning.  When he “translated” the Book of Mormon, he did not read from the gold plates; he looked into the crystals of the Urim and Thummim, or gazed at the seerstone.  The words came by inspiration, not by reading the characters on the plates.  By analogy, it seemed likely that the papyri had been an occasion for receiving a revelation rather than a word-for-word interpretation of the hieroglyphics as in ordinary translations.  Joseph translated Abraham as ne had the characters on the gold plates, by knowing the meaning without actually knowing the plates’ language.  Warren Parish, his clerk, said, “I have set by his side and penned down the translation of the Egyptian Hieroglyphicks as he claimed to receive it by direct inspiration of heaven.”  When Chandler arrived with the scrolls, Joseph saw the papyri and inspiration struck.  Not one to deny God’s promptings of Abraham and Joseph.  The whole thing was miraculous, and to reduce Joseph’s translation to some quasi-natural process, some concluded, was folly.

The peculiar fact is that the results were not entirely out of line with the huge apocryphal literature on Abraham.  His book of Abraham picked up themes found in texts like the Book of Jasher and Flavius Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews.  In these extrabiblical stories, Abraham’s father worshiped idols, people tried to murder Abraham because of his resistance, and Abraham was learned in astronomy-all features of Joseph Smith’s narrative.  Josephus says, for example, that Abraham delivered “the science of astronomy” to the Egyptians, as does Joseph’s Abraham.  The parallels are not exact; the Book of Abraham was not a copy of any of the apocryphal texts.  In the Book of Jasher, Abraham destroys the idols of King Nimrod with a hatchet and is thrown into a furnace; Joseph’s Abraham is bound on a bedstead.  The similarities are far from complete, but the theme of resisting the king’s idolatry and an attempted execution followed by redemption by God are the same.  The parallels extend to numerous small details.

Joseph may have heard apocryphal stories of Abraham, although the Book of Jasher was not published in English until 1829 and not in the United States until 1840.  A Bible dictionary published by the American Sunday School Union summed up many of these apocryphal elements.  Whether Joseph knew of alternate accounts of Abraham or not, he created an original narrative that echoed apocryphal stories without imitating them.  Either by revelation, as his followers believed, or by some instinctive affinity for antiquity, Joseph made his own late-and unlikely-entry in the long tradition of extrabiblical narratives about the great patriarch.

…page 293

In light of Joseph’s language study, the Egyptian grammar appears as an awkward attempt to blend a scholarly approach to language with inspired translation.

So, what do you make of Nibley’s contention?  Is it plausible?

I want to point out some interesting things from his article–questions which Mormons should also start asking.  You can see the full article here.

What’s the difference, anyway, between baptising the dead and baptising babies? A tiny infant will have as much understanding as a dead person — none at all — of the complex philosophical belief-system it’s being inducted into when baptised, say, a Catholic. Transubstantiation? There’s daily communicants go to their deaths without any clear understanding of the concept. So what chance the mewling tot?

Indeed, given that all Christian Churches believe that the soul lives on after death and retains understanding and consciousness of self, doesn’t it make more sense to baptise dead adults than live babies?

Apart from which, if the Catholic bishops hold that the beliefs of the Mormons are pure baloney (as they must), and their rituals therefore perfectly meaningless, how can it matter to them what mumbo-jumbo Mormons might mutter over Catholic cadavers?

…

Let’s look at the facts as understood by the early followers of Christ. For more than 300 years after the Crucifixion, baptism of the dead was widely accepted, its biblical basis located in 1 Corinthians 15, 29: “Otherwise, what shall they do who are baptised for the dead if the dead rise not again at all? Why are they then baptised for them.” In other words, a deceased person could be baptised by proxy: otherwise, how could such a person be included in the Resurrection? A good question.

The radical Cerinthians and the Marcionites were especially energetic baptisers of the dead. It was to wrong-foot these sects, seen as competitors with the official Church at a time when it was consolidating its position as the State religion of the Roman Empire, that the Synods of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) voted, after bitter debate, to condemn the practice.

He makes the case that the decision to stop baptism for the dead was to marginalize these other Christian sects.  At this point, I wanted to learn more about this practice.  I was aware of the 1 Corinthians reference, but didn’t know that the practice went on for 4 centuries.  So, I decided to see what I could find on this.

John A. Tvedtnes, a Hebrew and early Christian scholar at BYU, writes:

Check out my posts on Marcionism and Gnosticism to learn more about these movements.  Here’s another post on Gnosticism and another on Montanism.  (My 2 gnostic posts are ranked #2 and #8 of my most viewed posts–funny because there aren’t many comments on them.)  There’s also an interesting link to Barry Bickmore’s site and Jeff Lindsay’s site.

Finally, I like his reasoning here.

What if Mormons are right and Catholics and Protestants wrong?

In that scenario, shouldn’t all members of all other religions be literally eternally grateful to the Mormons for sharing their saving grace even unto and after death?

If, on the other hand, it isn’t the Mormons at all, those who turn out to have been right can wave a merry farewell to the crestfallen followers of Brigham Young as they trundle downwards to their eternal comeuppance.

What’s the problem?

The Eastern Orthodox Church officially split with the Catholic Church in 1054.  The Pope excommunicated the Patriarch in Constantinople, so the Patriarch did the same to the Pope.  There had been some different emphasis on theology for quite some time.  For example, while the Catholic Church claimed that the Pope held all the leadership, the Orthodox Church held a much less central authority.  The Orthodox belief of revelation is that God speaks through these councils, not one central person.

There were seven early councils (such as the Nicene Council.) These edicts of these councils are usually considered scripture in the Orthodox church.  The various Orthodox churches (Russian, Greek, etc) are quite a bit more autonomous.  The Orthodox church even holds out that there could one day be an American Orthodox church, if membership warrants such an organization.

Even before the official split, there were many tensions between Rome and Constantinople.  In the podcast, the teacher refers to Rome as the “Western” church, and Constantinople as the “Eastern” church.  The western church spoke mostly Latin, while the eastern church spoke mostly Greek.  In the West, the church had an emphasis on:

1. Sin
2. Grace
3. Justification
4. Salvation
5. Sacraments

The eastern church agrees, but has a larger emphasis on:

1. Apophaticism – an emphasis on the mystery of God.
2. Tradition
3. Theosis
4. Icons

I’d like to talk about Theosis.  Theosis is a greek word meaning Deification, as in the deification of humanity.  Unfortunately, I do not know the name of the teacher, but anyone can download the podcast to hear him directly.  I’d like to quote the teacher directly.

“[Theosis] is the word that really sums up salvation.  In the West, we talk about sin and justification as a way of understanding salvation.  In the East, the emphasis is on theosis or deification.  We are changed so that we become like God, or Eastern theologians will say it even more strongly than that.  As Athanasius put it, ‘God became man, that man might become God.’  That’s theosis, or deification.

Well, that strikes the western mind as kind of a problematic way to understand theology and to understand the transforming effect of grace.  The eastern mind though sees that as the real purpose of Christ coming into the world, to transform us that we become like him.  In some ways, we can see that if we’re talking about union with Christ, or becoming more and more like Christ or becoming more and more like God.  But in the eastern expression of theosis, it is stated so strongly that Christ became man, that we might become God that most western thinkers pull back from that.  It sounds like a kind of heresy of some sort.  I expect closer examination of the eastern idea of theosis, will reveal that the eastern theology doesn’t for the most part, go over the line, but it uses language that can be suggested of something that western Christians would want to avoid.

The people in the west that pick up this same idea are the mystics, and in the west, they were constantly accused of pantheism.  Because, to the western mind, this kind of language, and this kind of expression goes too far because it tends to blur the distinction between God and his creation.”

I decided to look up theosis on Wikipedia, and found this interesting quote from St Ireneaus (who lived 130-202 AD.)  He is considered a saint in both the Catholic and Orthodox churches.  “St. Irenaeus explained this concept in Against Heresies, Book 5, in the Preface, “the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.”

It seems to me that mormons have much in common with this idea of theosis.  This sounds quite similar to Lorenzo Snow’s quote, “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be.” Comments?

Falcon makes the case that Joseph is a fraud because of his polygamy, and by extension, the Book of Mormon should not be considered scripture. So, I decided to issue a challenge. Here’s the reader’s digest version of the challenge, but you can see the entire set of instructions here.

So, let’s try an experiment. Let’s pretend that I perfectly agree that Joseph is a fraud. That means:

1. Joseph is a fraud because of polygamy.
2. The Book of Mormon is not scripture and is a fraud because Joseph was a fraud and sinning adulterer/polygamist.

Ok, now please defend these two propositions: (1) Why is Song of Solomon part of the Bible? (2) Why is the book of Psalms in the Bible?

For this experiment, I am now a former mormon. So please defend these propositions without referencing (1) Joseph or Brigham, (2) the mormon church (3) apostasy. However you are free to discuss:

(1) Why is polygamy ok in the Old Testament?
(2) Why do we accept scripture from these 2 particular individuals in particular?

All mormon ideas are off-limits. You may feel free to assume that I am now an atheist/agnostic at this point. Let me hear you defend these 2 books of scripture.

Falcon responded with this: (Please note, I am posting an edited response, because he did not follow the directions. Feel free to see his full response here.)

• So if we excluded anyone who sinned from being a person whose writings appear in the Bible, there would be no Bible. So how do we determine which sinners writings get to be called scripture and another sinners do not? Look at the quality and consistancy of the writing. Which is God breathed and which is not. Look at the evidence regarding the claims made.

• The Song of Solomon. How do you want to interpret it, metaphorically or literally. Metaphorically, it’s a story of Christ’s love for the Church. Literally it’s a picture of the marrage bond. It talks about the beauty of sex. It’s not offensive or degrading. There are no salacious jokes in the Song of Solomon. The language is not lewd, vulgar or obscene. It’s about a relationship. God shows us that sex is good. Our culture, as those before, have trashed it. Here’s a headline: God Endorses Sex! Subheadline: Enjoy it in the confines of marrage.

• The Book of Psalms is simply outstanding. David struggled with sin, but he loved God. It is said that David was a man after the heart of God. David’s sin is not condoned, it’s exposed and he pays the price for it. The appearance of the psalms in the OT does not excuse David’s sin. So there are two classes of people, as far as I am concerned. One struggles with sin but is not a charlatan. The other is a charlatan, a deceiver and a fraud. Different kind of heart. The good behavior does not excuse the bad behavior. For the record, about a third of the psalms are left anonymous. About half are written by David.

Ok, others are welcome to join in. What should the criteria for accepting writing as scripture be?

Montanism began in Phrygia, Turkey around 170 AD. It was quite different from Gnosticism and Marcionism. It had a huge emphasis on the Holy Spirit. By this time the miracles and prophecies that are so familiar in the NT period had disappeared . A man by the name of Montanus said miracles had ceased because of the worldliness of the church. He said the ‘Dispensation of the Fulness of the Son’ had been replaced by the ‘Dispensation of the Holy Spirit.’

Now, doesn’t this sound very similar to Joseph Smith and his ideas? Joseph referred to the ‘Dispensation of the Fulness of Times’. Joseph said that miracles were occurring once again through him, as evidenced by all the visions, miracles, and the golden plates.

Montanus claimed that the Holy Spirit still speaks, just as it did to Paul; that it’s speaking through Montanus, and that it also speaks to a couple of his associates; female prophetesses, Prisca (or Priscilla), and Maximilla.

Montanus is said to have been quoted to say, ‘I am the Lord God Omnipotent’ but in reality, he wasn’t claiming to be God, but rather speaking for God. Joseph Smith would have prefaced similar remarks with ‘thus saith the Lord.’

Montanus also believed that Christ was imminently returning, similar to Joseph Smith. Montanus also believed that the New Jerusalem was going to be in Phrygia. Joseph Smith made similar claims about the New Jerusalem being on the American continent. Montanus also stressed holiness and asceticism.

In Turkey, many congregations entirely converted to Montanism, and the movement spread to North Africa. It lasted through at least through at least the 7th century AD. His most famous convert was Tertullian, who coined the term trinity. It is interesting to note that both men were later termed heretics. Bible scholar FF Bruce referred to a conversation with a dominican scholar who remarks that it was amazing that such an intelligent man as Tertullian would allow himself to be led astray be Montanus. The instructor notes that there must have been something of more solid worth to Montanism than has generally been supposed to have attracted such an intelligent man as Tertullian.

Additionally, the pope in Rome endorsed Montanus for a time, but later recanted. Of course, the pope was much more of a pastor than head of the entire church at this time.

Ok, now you see some differences. Of course mormons don’t support women having the priesthood, but there is some evidence that women were teachers in the early church. The PBS series called The First Christians talks about women in the early church. It appears that there were many influential women in the early church, punctuated by Mary Magdalene, who was known as ‘the apostle of the apostles’, and holds the distinction of being the first person to see the resurrected Lord. There is a book called ‘the Gospel of Mary Magdalene which venerates Mary Magdalene.

The church was just beginning to embrace the concept of the trinity, though it was far from universal at the early period, especially when one considers the strange views of the Gnostics. It is unclear if Montanus shared Tertullian’s views on this concept.

Speaking of Gnostics, one author has compared the New Age movement to the Gnostics belief in self-deification. While this is not perfectly compatible with mormons beliefs of eternal progression, there are obvious similarities.

Montanus also claimed that his revelations superceded the apostles and that his words should be considered scripture. Of course mormons have the D&C, and hold similar views about Joseph Smith. This all leads to the question, should mormons be called non-Christians or rather Christian heretics? I’m not sure which term is better, but obviously the term heretic has some appeal to me.

Marcion lived 110 – 160 AD in Sinope, Turkey.  He is probably the first person who tried to establish a Christian canon.  His New Testament was much smaller than ours today.  It included an edited version of the Gospel of Luke, and 10 of Paul’s letters.  He was the son of a bishop, and originally embraced by the orthdox church, but due to his embracing of Gnostic doctrines, he was excommunicated.  However, his movement became so large that it rivaled the orthodox church in size for about a century.

Marcion was quite anti-jewish, and completely rejected the entire Old Testament.  He also heavily edited the Gospel of Luke, taking out all references to the virgin birth, the star, etc.  Marcion’s Gospel of Luke emphasized that Jesus was not at all human, but completely divine.  According to Marcion, Jesus just appeared in the 15th year of the reign of Ceasar, similar to the angels who appeared to Abraham.

Marcion was a huge proponent of Paul.  The teacher in the class says that of all early church fathers, Marcion understood Paul’s message the best, but he still misunderstood Paul.  Church father Polycarp, referred to Marcion as “the first born of Satan,” so he was quite obviously a target of revulsion in the 2nd century.

It is interesting to me that these movements came so quickly after the death of the apostles.  It seems that the early Christian beliefs were much more diverse than is often taught in most Sunday School classes.  So-called “Traditional” Christianity is based primarily on the Catholic/Orthodox churches.  But we learn at this time period, the term Catholic was not even used.  Terms such as Gnostics, Marcionites, Ebionites, Montanists, and the Orthodox church were more commonly used during the pre-Nicene period of Christianity. This seems much more consistent with the various differences we have today:  Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodist, etc, although the differences today are much smaller than the differences 1900 years ago.

For mormons, these early sects/denominations quite nicely illustrate “the Apostasy,” and we aren’t completely sure that the original church “got it right.” Of course protestants, while they may disagree among themselves, generally think the Orthodox “got it right” concerning much of theology.  Comments?

The first thing I learned was that the term “heresy” originally meant “opinion.”  It had no negative connotation.  However, with these 3 movements, the term took on a much more derisive connotation.  Othrodoxy literally means “straight thinking”, just as an orthodontist “straightens teeth.”  These other movements are “heterodoxy”, meaning “other thinking.”

Gnosticism is very interesting in the fact that it is so varied.  There were Jewish gnostics, Christian gnostics, and pagan gnostics.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, gnosticism deals with secret knowledge.  While Gnostics were quite diverse, they did have some things in common.  They were not monotheistic.  They believed there was a good god, and a bad good.  It was the bad god that created the earth.  Often, they named this bad god Jehovah.

The body and all of creation was a terrible thing.  Gnostics preferred to denigrate everything worldly, and thought the body was a terrible thing.  However each person was endowed with spiritual sparks from the good god.  Gnostics believed that it was important to cast off the body in order to return to the good god.

Christian gnostics believed that Christ was not actually human, that he was not born, and that he came supernaturally to the earth.  They don’t believe in Mary, Joseph, the star, and all that is associated in the Biblical story.  The Gospel of Thomas is a gnostic gospel.  It is not a narrative, like the 4 gospels are, but rather just a group of sayings of Jesus.  Gnostics valued intellectual/spiritual knowledge above all.  One could say they were the first group to espouse “intellectualism.”

Some of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas are familiar, with some new twists, such as “Give unto Ceaser, the things which are Ceasar’s.  Give unto God the things which are God’s, and give unto me, that which is mine.”  The First Christians is a 4-part series by PBS that is outstanding regarding early Christian history, and talk a little about gnostics.

Another gnostic gospel is the Gospel of Judas.  In this gospel, Judas is the hero as he helps Jesus get rid of his body to return to the good god.  The other 11 apostles are portrayed as not as intelligent as Judas, and that Judas is Jesus’ favorite apostle.  Other gnostic writings make Cain the hero because he slew Abel, and helped him get rid of his corrupt physical body.  So gnostic writings were obviously quite strange, and definitely unorthodox.

Other gnostics believed that in order to escape this world, one had to complete many steps, and needed to know secret passwords to get to other aeons.  One gnostic even claims to say there were 365 steps in order to return to the good god.

Bishop Irenaeus, who lived around 150 BC, coined the term “orthodox” was one person who tried to define orthodoxy, and really took issue with gnostics and Marcionites (which I’ll talk about in my next post.)  He also tried to define the canon of scripture, and was the first to try to limit the canon to four gospels.  (There are over 50 gospels in existence that modern scholars are aware of.)

I have wondered if the Sadducees, a Jewish group opposed to Jesus in the Gospels, were related to the gnostics at all.  Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection, similar to the gnostics.  However, I think this is the only real similarity.  It seems like they were in charge of the temple at Jerusalem.  Is there anyone out there that can answer this question?

I enjoy looking at these heresies, as it seems the LDS church is acting similar to Irenaeus, regarding heresies.  There is a real attempt to define orthodoxy in the church, and to stamp out anything considered heretical, whether it be early church history, same-sex marriage, women and the priesthood, or other controversial topics.  I know some who read this blog are quite liberal in their LDS beliefs.  What do you think of the similarities between the intellectual gnostics, and intellectuals in the LDS church?

Gnosticism means “secret knowledge.”  This is not to be confused with the term Agnostic, which means “without knowledge.”  Typically, Agnostic people are without knowledge of God.  Some are atheists, but not all.  Agnostics typically are ambivalent about whether God exists or not.

Gnostics, on the other hand, date from the time of Christ.  Gnostic should probably be considered a generic term, such as Protestant.  For example, while Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, etc. are all considered “protestant”, they certainly don’t all believe exactly the same.  Protestant is a term to group nearly all “non-Catholic” groups together.  In essence, these groups are “protesting” against some of the beliefs of the Catholic church.

So, when one refers to Gnostics, one should realize that there are various different beliefs.  Let me illustrate with some probably poor examples, but hopefully it will help illustrate my point.  There are probably anti-jewish gnostics, non-resurrection gnostics, gentile gnostics, mystical gnostics, etc.

Your typical Sunday School class (and I’m talking Catholic, Protestant, or Mormon here), generally gives early Christian church history something like this.  Jesus ordained 12 apostles, these 12 apostles were in charge of the church.  Peter was probably the leader.  The apostles were killed.  Constantine became a Christian.  He wanted a Bible.  He commissioned the Council of Nicea.  The various denominations sprang from there.

While this characterization isn’t necessarily wrong, per se, it completely under-emphasizes the diversity of the early church.  The Bible talks about Zealots, Pharisees, Sadducees, etc, and one gets the impression that the early church organization was simple.  When one gets to the Letters of Paul, there are hints of apostacy (ie gnosticism), but one doesn’t really get a true flavor of the dissension.

Enter the Nag Hammadi Library, discovered in Egypt in 1945.  This is not to be confused with the Dead Sea Scrolls (discovered 1947-49).  Let’s talk about these for a moment about these.  The Dead Sea Scrolls probably get more publicity, because they appeal to Jews as well as Christians.  The Dead Sea Scrolls contain some of the oldest copies of the Old Testament ever found, as well as some apocolyptic writings of the Jews.  These writings date to approximately 50 years before Christ.  Perhaps I will talk more about this history in a future post.

The Nag Hammadi Library dates to about the 1st or 2nd century AD, and is strictly Christian writings.  There are some New Testament writing there, but many are considered gnostic, such as the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Gospel of Thomas, and others.  These were considered heretical by the early church fathers, and were not included in the Bible.

Gnostics writings are all over the map, as far as doctrine.  Some believe that Jesus did not die on the cross.  Others believe that Jesus was not resurrected.  Some believe Jesus didn’t exist at all.  We learn in the Gospel of Judas, that Judas was really the smartest apostle, and that he did not really betray Jesus at all–Jesus asked him to turn him over to the Romans so that he could get rid of his body.  According to this line of thinking, resurrection is a bad thing.  One needs to rid oneself of the body, so that one can obtain true knowledge.  Gnostic beliefs are related in the fact that the resurrection story is not the important part of Jesus story, but rather, the teachings (or knowledge) of Jesus are what is important.  (So, even dating to the time of Christ, there were problems with “intellectualism.”) 

So, you can see why Paul had a problem with some of these teachings.  Also, we see that the Orthodox and Catholic churches had some major problems with Gnostic beliefs.

The interesting thing about Constantine establishing Christianity as the official state religion, was that he essential chose one brand of Christianity (the Orthodox church, which later split into the Catholic and Orthodox churches), and started persecuting all the other Christians who we now call Gnostic Christians.

After Jesus died, essentially there was a succession crisis, just as there was a crisis when Joseph Smith died.  Neither Jesus or Joseph left clear instructions on what was to happen after they died.  Now the Catholic and LDS churches don’t like to hear that, but it is really true.  Many early Christian historians say that it really wasn’t Peter in charge of the early church, but rather Jesus brother James, who was the first bishop of Jerusalem.

Wilfred Griggs recently made some interesting insights into early christian (especially Egyptian Christian) beliefs.  He said gnostics did temple worship, and made some comparisons to mormon temple worship.  Now while that is nice to hear in a fireside, he did leave out some beliefs of the gnostics, such as the unimportance of the resurrection.  Nonetheless, it does appear to show that temple worship was part of the early Christian heritage, contrary to Catholic and Protestant beliefs, and could show that Joseph may have brought back some early Christian beliefs.

Incidentally, the only remaining group alive today that can trace part of it’s history to gnostic beliefs is the Coptic Church in Egypt.  They are really a break off of the Orthodox Church from the first millennium AD, and are somewhat of a hybrid between gnosticism and the Orthodox church.

This all reminds me of what Joseph Smith said regarding the Apocrypha (gnostic writings are considered apocryphal writings, though obviously they were discovered 100 years after Joseph’s death.)  He said basically that there are some good things and some bad things in the Apocryphya.  Frankly, I find this analysis right on the money.